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Warren Ruda / The Citizens' Voice
Jim Straub, president of The Wyoming Valley Real Estate Investors Association, puts his experience as a landlord to use by working with and helping local landlords.

By his count, Jim Straub is about 1,900 years old. In landlord years, that is.

As the president of The Wyoming Valley Real Estate Investors Association, Straub, 60, is putting his experience to use working with and helping local landlords. For each tenant Straub has, he adds one year to his landlord age. With as many as 90 units at one point in his career, the years added up quickly.

But he didn't start out planning to make renting homes a business. It started with three properties, one for each of his children, that Straub called "college funds." Each time a kid was born, he bought a new property that he intended to sell in about 18 years to pay for tuition.

"I'd been involved with a number of rental properties for many years, and like a lot of landlords, I did it by myself, with no help, no encouragement, no mentor," he said.

Between Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, there are more than 67,500 rental units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005-07 American Community Survey.

Today, he not only helps arrange association meetings and works with landlords who are members, but doles out advice to non-members who come to him with questions.

Beyond that, he's served as an advocate for landlords in communities throughout the valley, fighting ordinances and working with council members on issues that range from more effectively enforcing inspections in Wilkes-Barre to notifying landlords about nuisance offenses in Pittston to creating a $50 annual per-unit "landlord tax."

"I can be loud and boisterous at times," he said. "I'm not afraid of being outspoken. What's right is right."

There are property owners who are slumlords, Straub said, and admits he's had properties that were "pretty ugly looking," but many landlords have gotten a bum rap. He encourages other landlords to keep properties up, but knows many landlords have a "soft spot" and take risks renting to people.

"Unfortunately, people love to use the name 'slumlord,'" Straub said. "And right now, I probably have one apartment that if you walked into it you would call a slum, but when you put your blood, sweat and tears into a place and get it all ready and then six months later they let their dogs run loose and they bust up the walls, and you do that three or four times, you get pretty disheartened, and you say, I'm not going to fix this place up again."

The landlords Straub works with range from "the little old lady across the street with a one-bedroom upstairs," to people with 100 or more units. It's often the smaller operations, people with fewer 'landlord years,' that have questions for him and more use for organizations like the Real Estate Investors Association, he said.

"When you look at it, landlording is one of the largest small businesses in the world," Straub said. "A lot of times you don't think about it - we're landlords, we're those nasty people - but we're just running a small business."

emoody@citizensvoice.com, 570-821-2051

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